The Road Home

In place of a dedication, a prefatory note tells us that the poems in Franz Wright's new collection, ''The Beforelife,'' were written in a single year, from December of 1998 to December of 1999, and for his wife. From the first, though, it's clear that they don't represent the best of husbandliness: almost every ''you'' is a talking-to-oneself ''you'' (''While you lie in bed / watching the movie / of every last terrible / thing you have done'') or an impersonal, general kind, as in ''Death is nature's way / of telling you to be quiet.'' They're ''for,'' not ''to,'' her, though more than several could have begun as apologies.

''Beforelife'': the word is so striking that the halting suspense of a double-crostic puzzle overhangs the book, as each poem individually withholds final definition. The title poem begins with the word ''Meanwhile.'' Dedicated to the poet Thomas Lux, it goes:

Meanwhile,

I visit the word world.

In between feeding my friends,

the alert preternaturally unafraid

birds

of Purgatory Cove.

Its wordplay aside, this poem is uncharacteristic of the work in ''The Beforelife'' in that the tone underlying most of the others is fury, strictly contained. The anger is aimed at a variety of targets -- the damned world'' included -- and it hits most of them, though many times it's intentionally sent wide. Where Wright's fury is directed most often (and hits) is at addiction: tequila, champagne and beer, a needle and a joint are all mentioned by name. But because he is the son of the revered poet James Wright, who died in 1980 at the age of 53, and because he links addiction -- specifically drinking -- to thoughts about his father, the book can't help passing judgment on them as poets, father and son. ''The Dead Dads'' begins:

It's easier to get a rope

through the eye of a needle than

the drunk son of a drunk

into stopping

into waking -- oh no, not

this guy

who is, he writes, ''intent on / finding out and finding out / exactly'' what his father lived through.

These poems, although it's not stated, must surely have been written during a year spent dry -- the beforelife being the sick, addictive, drinking life. For all their recurrent ambiguity, in sequence they brilliantly duplicate the willfulness and self-spite of the drinker's impulse, with its addictive trips back to what seems like conscious choice but is not to be trusted.

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Franz Wright, who is also known as a translator of Rilke and of the French metaphysical surrealist Rene Char, is 47; in 1996 he won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, which is given to a poet whose work fulfills early promise. Just the year before, he was honored as a ''young poet'' -- an irony he might almost savor. Several times in this volume a black comedy of literary-poetical manners is let rip -- in poems like ''Accepting an Award,'' ''Slander'' and ''When You See Fame Coming Run.'' In his poetry, Wright -- whose ''Ill Lit: Selected & New Poems'' came out in 1998 -- has avoided his father's expansiveness; he favors the brief unlyrical lyric (rhymes are rare), narrow on the page, so that his poems move word by word and their line breaks hocus you into doubled readings. A final word might hang in space, indeterminate. Many of his poems are Char-like, noirish near-aphorisms that suddenly scramble themselves into Dada, or flip into anticlimax. They're mostly miniatures, the beginnings or endings of Hopperesque stories with a European gloss, their diction mixing mid-American colloquial speech and turns that evoke out-of-context translations. The quirks of ''the word world'' are picked up, wiped off and admired for their paradoxical insanities. The poems of ''The Beforelife'' behave the same as Wright's earlier work, but the context is new.

The poems here frequently and (this is new) overtly focus on the poet who he clearly feels got him into this mess. ''To a Blossoming Nut Case,'' one is titled, though its content couldn't have less to do with that of ''To a Blossoming Pear Tree,'' the title poem of the last book Wright's father published while he was alive. But ''The Beforelife,'' perhaps because its fragmentary poems are literally, formally, shattered, is perhaps the most discreet of all furious literary-family memoirs. ''My dad beat me with his belt,'' a poem called ''Primogeniture'' begins, but since ''once'' or ''daily'' is never specified, this could simply be rhetoric. (Anyone who's ever daydreamed of having a father like James Wright might long for more poems like ''Resurrection: Elegy,'' an amicus brief that traces a connection, via Mahler and drink and a family friend, to the father as he is in his poems: ''The vast golden house of this music.'')

In any event, it's the Franz Wright character who comes in for the worst of it in this book: ''put out all the lights / in the house -- / behave like you aren't there / if some night when / it's blizzarding, you see / Franz Wright arrive'' is one of the milder self-characterizations. Unfortunately, in his more ''poetic'' idioms -- A hungry ghost,'' ''a ghost / that everyone can see'' -- his dramatization sounds like self-pity. But then again, until recently many people found only bathos in John Berryman's 12-step-inflected ''Eleven Addresses to the Lord.''

These may or may not be the poems for someone already in treatment, or perhaps it depends on which step he or she is in. One poem at a time? In his conscious choice here against a certain kind of romanticism, what Wright does not overtly acknowledge is the kinship that makes a son not only a drinker like his father but also a poet like his father. And yet his prefatory note begins, ''I wrote these poems.'' By indirection at least, Wright has reached the step where you begin to express love.